Boeing officials open their new customer support operations center at their facility in Seal Beach on Friday, September 12, 2014. The new operations center features dozens of work terminals for engineers and other who can offer a variety of support services to their customers who fly Boeing airplanes. (Scott Varley / Staff Photographer)

Boeing vice presidents Lynne Thompson, left, and Stan Deal officially open their new customer support operations center at their facility in Seal Beach on Friday, September 12, 2014. (Scott Varley / Staff Photographer)

SEAL BEACH >> Whether there’s an airplane cargo loader that needs repairing or a computer screen message on a flight deck that needs troubleshooting, the help calls of airlines that operate more than 13,000 Boeing commercial planes will now come through the company’s facility in Seal Beach.

Boeing Co. officials on Friday celebrated the grand opening of a new Operations Center in Seal Beach, a facility dedicated to providing customer service for the more than 800 airlines that fly Boeing planes.

By late 2015, the new center will provide support for the next generation of 737, 747, 767 and 777 planes, as well as support for out-of-production airplane models.

“It’s not just about delivering aircraft; it’s really about how you support it, how you provide that world class support once the airplane’s over the fence and in our customers’ hands,” said Stan Deal, senior vice president of Boeing Commercial Aviation Services.

Boeing’s Commercial Aviation Services, which started as a field service unit in 1936 with 24 employees, today includes more than 13,000 employees, including 330 field service representatives in 60 countries.

The new Seal Beach facility is larger and less enclosed than the one in Puget Sound, officials said. The new center, which takes up the building’s entire second floor, consists of a circular space outfitted with 80-inch LCD monitors inside and outside of the work circle that displays different kinds of information, from a real-time map that shows where Boeing commercial planes are flying around the world to where repair requests are in the process. The areas surrounding the center, which Boeing Commercial Airplanes Customer Support vice president Lynne Thompson called “the neighborhood,” consist of structure and systems engineers and other support to help respond to requests.

“It builds that collaborative environment,” said Karlton Okamoto, senior manager of the 24/7 operations center. “Before, you would have people working on different floors or different sites. Now we bring everyone together and they’re able to listen to each other and hear jobs going on around them and they can jump in when they need to.”

News of Boeing’s plan to realign its engineering operations and centralize its customer support broke in April, when the company announced that it would move roughly 1,000 engineering jobs from Puget Sound to Long Beach and Seal Beach over the next two years.

Boeing at the time said that applicants will likely come from a mix of three groups: Puget Sound-based Boeing employees transitioning to Southern California, Boeing employees working on the C-17 Globemaster III in East Long Beach and a talent pool of Southern California engineers, including local college graduates.

Local officials welcomed the news, calling it an economic boost for a region about to see the closure of its last fixed-wing airplane manufacturing plant with the 2015 shuttering of Boeing’s C-17 military cargo plane program.

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